Subject: Re: [lojban] noxemol ce'u

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 01:47:43 -0400 (EDT)

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Nick NICHOLAS wrote:

>
> I tuned out of this discussion, and now that I have caught sight of it, I
> wish I hadn't.

Heh. If it's good enough for you, it's good enough for me too!

> And since a number is *not* intersubstitutable with a proposition, so
> ni1 and ni2 are irreconcilable (ni and ka should not properly be
> intersubstitutable in any context), we can do two things:

Why are you saying ka creates a proposition? Is this the fruit of our
revolution??

> 1) Say sentences where ni2 arises (as bound-ni) are wrong, and that you
> shouldn't say {le pixra cu cenba le ni ce'u blanu [kei]} at all, but {le
> pixra cu cenba leka leni ce'u blanu cu barda};
>
> 2) (Messier, but I think far more desirable): do type-coercion: say that
> you're using ni to talk about a ka, and that you're doing it kind of
> elliptically, but without formally marking that ellipticality. So {le
> pixra cu cenba le ni ce'u blanu [kei]} would be called a convenient
> shorthand for saying {le pixra cu cenba leka leni ce'u blanu cu barda}.
> The type-coercion comes in in that clearly a number makes no sense as the
> x2 of cenba, as you rightly point out, so you behind-the-scenes turn it
> into something that does make sense.

3) Learn from the interesting fact that Lojban thinks it makes sense to
say {le pixra cu cenba le ni ce'u blanu}. What does this tell us about
numbers and the world?

>
> This really means {tu'a le ni...}, of course, and there's no precedent for
> type-coercion in Lojban: if you mean tu'a, you say tu'a. But I'd rather
> make an exception for {ni} than break the baseline --- which, sorrily, is
> arguably broken for {ni} just as it is for {ka}. We've had the Palace Coup
> for {ka}; let's not have one for {ni} as well.

This seems like something totally different though.

-----
Sami ul-Haq, Osama bin Laden's closest friend in Pakistan, runs the
"University for the Education of Truth," a fundamentalist institution that
educated and trained nine out of the Taliban's top 10 leaders.